This invention relates to a method of making a hard book cover of a type which comprises two cover board members and a spine member or spine strip held together by a middle covering, and two more coverings (e.g. a hide, plastics, or paper sheet and the like) for said cover board and spine members.
Throughout this specification, appended claims, and abstract of the disclosure, the term "cover board member(s)" and "spine member" will refer to platelike members of paperboard, cardboard, and the like pasteboard of some consistency as widely employed in the bookbinding art, while by the term coverings reference will be made to a covering for said material cover board and spine members.
In particular coverings applied to the cover board members will be referred to as the coverings, and the covering applied to the spine member as the middle covering. In general, the middle covering is selected with a different color from the color of the side coverings, which are usually of the same color, thereby the resulting binding is of the so-called two-color type.
The most widely used technique for making bindings of the type specified above on a commercial scale provides for the stiff portion thereof to be formed first by joining two cover board members to a corresponding spine member, as by gluing, in an appropriate spaced-apart relationship onto a middle covering.
Thereafter, a respective side covering is applied to (glued on) each of said cover board members.
In actual practice, an apparatus is used for spreading a glue over one face of a middle covering, gluing the cover board and spine members of a binding thereon, to provide in essence a blank (the stiff portion of the binding in question), and stacking the blanks so obtained; in a subsequent step, glue is spread over one face of the side coverings, and these coverings are applied to the cover board members of each blank as progressively picked up from the stack.
Complexity and time-consumption to complete a processing cycle yielding the ultimate half-binding type cover are the most widely recognized disadvantages of the above-discussed technique, which penalize productivity and production costs of such book bindings.